headlessChrome

DO NOT USE! This project does not work anymore due to changes in Chrome. Use the Chrome DevTools protocol in chromedp instead!

headlessChrome 🤖

Support only for Ubuntu on Docker for now. Mac appears to not be working. 😬

A go package for working with headless Chrome. Run interactive JavaScript commands on pages with go and Chrome without a GUI. Includes a few helpful functions out of the box to query and click selector paths by their classes, divs, or html content.

You could use this package to click buttons and scrape content on/from a website as if you were a browser, or to render pages that wouldn't be supported by other things like phantomjs or casperjs. Especially useful for sites that use EmberJS, where the content is rendered by javascript after the HTML payload is delivered.

Examples

An example project that does some simple things with a Makefile and Dockerfile is in the examples directory.

Install

go get github.com/integrii/headlessChrome

Documentation

http://godoc.org/github.com/integrii/headlessChrome

To run Chrome headless with docker, check out examples/docker/main.go as well as examples/docker/Makefile. When in that directory, you can do make test to build and run the container with the example app inside. You will see the source of httpbin.org displayed at the end of the build and run.

By default, we startup with the bare minimum flags necessary to start headless chrome and open a javascript console. If you want more flags, like a resolution size, or a custom User-Agent, you can specify it by replacing the Args variable. Just be sure to append to it so you don't kill the default flags...

headlessChrome.Args = append(headlessChrome.Args,"--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36")
headlessChrome.Args = append(headlessChrome.Args,"--window-size=1024,768")

Change the path to Chrome by simply setting the headlessChrome.ChromePath variable.

headlessChrome.ChromePath = `/opt/google/chrome-unstable/chrome`

Find the full list in the docs.

// click some span element from the page by its text content
browser.ClickItemWithInnerHTML("span", "Google Search",0)

// select the content of something by its css classes
browser.GetContentOfItemWithClasses("button arrow bold",0)
time.Sleep(time.Second) // give it a second to query

// read the selected stuff from the console by picking
// the next item from the output channel
fmt.Println(<-browser.Output)

Contributing

Please send pull requests! It would be good to have support for more operating systems or more handy helpers to run more commonly used javascript code easily. Adding support for other operating systems should be as simple as checking the platform type and changing the ChromePath variable's default value.